October 5, 2005
Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Arguing that “race shapes white women’s lives” as well as the lives of women of color, Frankenberg asks dominant (white) academic feminism to recognize its relation to both race and racism (1). Analyzing whiteness in material and discursive terms, Frankenberg suggests that whiteness is socially constructed and, while it is frequently racialized as racism, it can in fact become a site of resistance to racism. White Women, Race Matters centers around 30 interviews Frankenberg conducted with white women between 1984 and 1986 in Northern California. Her interviewees were diverse in “age, class, region of origin, sexuality, family situation, and political orientation,” and by reading these interviews critically against themselves, one another, and her own questions, Frankenberg hopes to convey the way in which “race, racial dominance, and whiteness” are “complex, lived experiences” (23, 22). By insisting that racism is a “‘white issue’” as well as an issue that results from the ways in which racial discourses and material relations are reproduced, Frankenberg “attempts […] subversion” by way of an “investigation of self rather than of other(s)” (18). This study calls for its own self investigation and in doing so, models a self-critical model of study that has implicit—rather than explicit—pedagogical ramifications.
In “White on White: The Interviewees and the Method,” Frankenberg describes her choice to break the distance between interviewer and interviewee, allowing the interviewer to intervene with her own personal stories. She disrupts interviewer/interviewee roles “in order to facilitate the breaking of silence on race by a diverse range of white women” (35). “Growing Up White: The Social Geography of Race” uses specific interviews to chart the way landscape is socially and racially structured and is complex for everyone living in that landscape, no matter how progressive and/or liberal they see themselves as being. In “Race, Sex, and Intimacy I: Mapping a Discourse,” Frankenberg’s interviews illuminate the far-reaching impact of the discourse against interracial relationships. “Race, Sex, and Intimacy II: Interracial Couples and Interracial Parenting” turns to interracial couples specifically, noting that members of such relationships can hold diverse and complex relationships to racism even while their positions within such relationships allow them to inhabit a site of resistance against racist discourses. “Thinking Through Race” negotiates the legacy of essentialist racism and its connection to political and economic inequality, while “Questions of Culture and Belonging” warns, with Trinh and Mohanty, against a “bounding” of “culture.” Such bounding, Frankenberg writes, can lead to a romanticism of oppression and ultimately white supremacy.
Finally, White Women, Race Matters’ epilogue, “Racism, Antiracism, and the Meaning of Whiteness,” claims that racism is a relational term signaling the production of dominance. To combat this production, Frankenberg calls for a collective alteration of all racial and cultural identities, for just as whiteness must be included in any analysis of race, so too must a political project seeking to end racial oppression alter the terms of all necessarily “coconstructed” and inter-related racial categories (243).